Warren Ellishttp://www.warrenellis.com
WARREN ELLIS is a graphic novelist and author of the NYT best-selling novel GUN MACHINE. His graphic novel GLOBAL FREQUENCY is being developed for television by Jerry Bruckheimer and FOX. He is the writer of the graphic novel RED, adapted into the film starring Bruce Willis and Helen Mirren. His next book is NORMAL from FSG.Fri, 31 Jul 2015 23:19:56 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.3Warren Ellishttp://www.warrenellis.com/?p=15124
http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=15124#commentsMon, 27 Oct 2014 16:47:04 +0000http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=15124

Warren Ellis is the award-winning writer of graphic novels like TRANSMETROPOLITAN, FELL, MINISTRY OF SPACE and PLANETARY, and the author of the NYT-bestselling GUN MACHINE and the “underground classic” novel CROOKED LITTLE VEIN. The movie RED is based on his graphic novel of the same name.

]]>http://www.warrenellis.com/?feed=rss2&p=151240AGAINST THE DAY: A Late Thought About The Book About The Centuryhttp://www.warrenellis.com/?p=15115
http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=15115#commentsWed, 26 Mar 2014 17:21:05 +0000http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=15115Thomas Pynchon’s AGAINST THE DAY is a book that is almost impossible to finish. In many ways, it defeats the point of finishing it. It’s more than a thousand pages long, and each individual scene is pretty much the size of a novella. It’s a novel that you can dip into like an encyclopedia. It’s set between 1893 and World War I, and it came out in 2006. It’s in no way current. But I’m sitting down and writing this because it’s about everything. It might even be the defining novel of the 21st Century.

It is, as was much post-modernism, about settling the outstanding sociocultural business of the 20th Century. It was the first century bright and loud enough to make the mimetic novel’s tendency to want to tie up all loose ends into a joke. We live now in a century where the CTO of the CIA can proudly announce at a security conference that we can now know everything that happens everywhere in real time, but, as we have since discovered, being able to record everything is not the same as knowing and understanding everything. Every phone call in America is committed to storage for thirty days, but only the tiniest fraction are ever listened to by the state or anyone else. There are hundreds of characters in motion in AGAINST THE DAY. Even the mighty human swarm action of Wikipedia broke against the task of even tracking their action in chapters. In telling a story about the disconnected 20th Century, Pynchon’s omniscient view conjures the blare of the 21st, a world in which the number of people we can invest in and follow the lives of has been calculated by anthropologists. (It’s called the Dunbar Number. A hundred and fifty people.)

AGAINST THE DAY cycles through genres like a long-running television show entering its decadent phase. (And AGAINST THE DAY is certainly a decadent book.) There are sections written in the style of the weird boy’s-own adventures of the period, the “Edisonades” of young scientists romping through fantasy scenarios like demented Scouts. There’s a period detective story, featuring a PI who eats sub-toxic doses of dynamite in order to become immune to explosions. There’s a Western about anarchists, and a subplot about rare crystals that can split a person into two. Doubling is an important theme in the book, and sometimes I think that Pynchon is telling us that there is here: that that time is this time. For all its Zeppelins, Hollow Earth passages and psychics, there’s nothing more strange than the days we live in now.

The world of AGAINST THE DAY is as awash with scientific marvels as ours. Nikola Tesla even makes an appearance. A constant surges of wonders technological and mythical, just as ours: because we live in a world of myths too, the myths of other universes creating cold spots in the sky where they bump against ours, as in the theories of Laura Mersini-Houghton, and the ordinary technological marvels of satellites that speak to the slivers of glass in our pockets and the machines that print new human organs.

What I want to say about it is this: it’s a book about being on the brink. More so than CABARET, not least because CABARET has been defanged by the years and is now nothing more than a dumb receptacle for Weimar chic. CABARET is about being blind to the brink. AGAINST THE DAY casts the brink as an oncoming storm, the biggest one in history, the one that nobody could be prepared for. It’s the story of being in the eye of it. There were a few such eyes in the 20th Century. There will be none in the 21st, the era of what the tech community is pleased to call “disruption.” This is how we’re going to live from now on – surrounded by the swirl of strange and terrible weather, never quite knowing when the great black wall of it will shift and slam into us. AGAINST THE DAY will remain relevant, because it’s the picture of every minute of every day from now on. Amazing things, every single different kind of story we can imagine, and the altitude thrill of constantly being on the edge of bubbling fatal chaos.

AGAINST THE DAY is the double of the modern world. It’s the book we never want to finish.

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]]>http://www.warrenellis.com/?feed=rss2&p=151150IndieWebhttp://www.warrenellis.com/?p=15111
http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=15111#commentsWed, 19 Mar 2014 16:35:48 +0000http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=15111This is a thing I’ve been following since last year. Willow Brugh has just taken a shot at simplifying it for stupid people like me.

Some friends of mine have been advocating for this rad thing called IndieWeb. It’s a way of regaining control of your information, data, and profile online. This is my first pass at explaining what it is they’re up to.

I post it here both because it’s interesting and because I have a strong urge to use it as the basis for developing this site in the future. This will involve depressing and time-consuming stuff like moving the site hosting and learning how WordPress works under the bonnet a little more. This site will never be the full eight-posts-a-day churn that it once was — curation blogging is probably best served on a socially connected system like Tumblr in any case — but when I do write new material for public view, I intend that most if not all of it be for a site I own. I don’t think we should be writing new material for stack algorithms to chew on and digest for ad technologies. (Unless that’s the specific intent.)

There’s a certain kind of cookbook that you — or at least I — can read like it’s fiction. Science fiction, even. I was talking with Janice Wang, a researcher at MIT Media Lab, about this at South By the other day. (That was a really interesting visit, by the way.) She was trying to put together a thing about food in science fiction, and having a little trouble finding too much about food culture in sf. And all I could think of was the three cookbooks I’d gotten recently, written by chefs from NOMA. NOMA is a Nordic restaurant dedicated to reinventing hyperlocal, firmly seasonal foodstuffs with Science. And science is still the best poetic fiction there is.

The NOMA Leaf Broth requires fallen autumn leaves of two different vintages: the current year and the year before. They employ car parks full of dehydrators to smash plants down to a perfect powdered essence. Moss is a regular ingredient. Centrifuges and frozen gasses. All the foods are found within a certain radius around the NOMA location. It is near impossible to prepare many of the meals outside that area or without their lab. But that’s not the point.

These are books intended to make you think again about where you live. They serve the essential journalistic element of social fiction: this is where I think I am today and this is what I think it looks like. And then they apply technologies entirely unexpected in the culinary context — like their forebears, people like Heston Blumenthal and Ferran Adria — to try and make us reconsider the possibilities inherent in our current context. Cookbooks of the Science Fiction Condition. Take your eyes off the rear view mirror for a second and see people using Mad Scientist shit to make dinner.

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]]>http://www.warrenellis.com/?feed=rss2&p=151060MOON KNIGHT #1http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=15100
http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=15100#commentsWed, 05 Mar 2014 19:55:00 +0000http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=15100Out today in most territories. First of my new comics series projects to emerge this year. A little touch of Weird Crime in the world of Marvel Comics.

(If longtime readers were wondering what happened to the SCATTERLANDS experiment? We got involved with this instead. Basically, we had so much fun doing SCATTERLANDS that we wondered what a full series together would look like, and then it took over.)

I’m working on the end of issue 4 right now, while Jason has just wrapped issue 3. We expect to have six issues in the can by the end of May, when issue 1 is published. Final order cut-off for comics stores on issue 1 is May 5.

Ten years after they landed. All over the world. And they did nothing, standing on the surface of the Earth like trees, exerting their silent pressure on the world, as if there were no-one here and nothing under foot. Ten years since we learned that there is intelligent life in the universe, but that they did not recognise us as intelligent or alive. Beginning a new science fiction graphic novel by Warren Ellis & Jason Howard.

]]>http://www.warrenellis.com/?feed=rss2&p=150960RIP Laptophttp://www.warrenellis.com/?p=15089
http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=15089#commentsSat, 18 Jan 2014 16:46:51 +0000http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=15089I appear to have killed another laptop. I seem to beat them to death — and I’m using Lenovos, which are supposed to be road-warrior machines — every year or so. This one lasted eighteen months before throwing a BSOD and refusing to start Windows, insisting that a patch was preventing the system from… well, doing anything, really.

I’m flying out to LA in a week, and I have three critical jobs to complete before I go. Waiting until the Lenovo gets fixed – or, more likely, waiting for a new machine to arrive and then mounting the dead laptop’s hard drive as an XD so I can get some files off it — is not an option.

I’m writing this on the Chromebook Pixel I was given, which is a beautiful and highly productivity-oriented machine with a few key omissions by design. Like, I can’t run Audacity on it. So, there’ll be no more SPEKTRMODULE podcasts until I get to the X1 Carbon I keep at Undisclosed Rural Location, and I don’t arrive there until February.

I can write like the wind on this thing, though. A few scripts are going to arrive somewhat odd-looking, because I’m writing in Google Drive without the formatting and macros I have access to in OpenOffice (which is still where I write my scripts, saving in RTF, which Drive also has a few issues with). But, between Drive, Gmail, Dropbox and Jungle Disk, the only files I don’t have access to right now are decidedly non-critical. (And I should be able to edit that one critical half-written RTF file on the iPad using Textilus.)

Also, of course, I’m not writing this post in Windows Live Writer like usual, so god knows how it’s going to look. Not that I write here much any more. But I wanted to mark the passing of [DEEPBLACK], the Lenovo Ideapad I beat to death in eighteen months. You served me well, giant creaky plastic black thing. If only you could have waited until I could more easily afford to replace your stupid dead ass.

In the intimate surroundings of The Farmhouse Barn, writer Warren Ellis sits down for a State Of The Weird, picking over the radioactive bones of 2013 and gathering the stories for a Briefing on the science-fiction condition of 2014. That night, he will be in the middle of writing a novella about futurists and a non-fiction book about the future of cities — except that they’re both also about strange history and Weird Shit — and he’s here to talk about deep time, storytelling and the weather of tomorrow.

It’s intended to be a small, conversational thing. First Outside World thing of the year, a good time and place to take stock and look ahead.

I’ve spent my entire life within ten miles of this river. I navigate through a full quarter of the country by the direction of this river. I will spend half of 2014 thousands of miles from it, for work and for life. It’s a river that forgives us for that, because for millennia it’s done nothing but spit shabby Englishmen out into the world. River salt in our blood.

Happy Solstice, Merry Xmas and Happy New Year. Stay well and stay alive, and I’ll see you on the other side.

— W

]]>http://www.warrenellis.com/?feed=rss2&p=150800ORBITAL OPERATIONS: A New Newsletterhttp://www.warrenellis.com/?p=15075
http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=15075#commentsFri, 06 Dec 2013 06:05:27 +0000http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=15075At some point over the weekend, I will be sending out the first post from a new email newsletter system, replacing the old MACHINE VISION newsletter that was sponsored by my previous book publisher. The onboarding page for ORBITAL OPERATIONS can be found, not unreasonably, at http://orbitaloperations.com/. Yes, it’s very minimalist. No need for anything fancier. (The signup form will also eventually appear in the sidebar here.)

It is likely to pollute your inbox on at least a weekly basis, maybe a little more, depending on what’s going on. It is likely to contain work updates, random incoherent thoughts and other mental rubbish guaranteed to improve your life and inoculate your brain against alien spores or god I don’t even know what I’m typing right now. It’s a thing that’s happening. Subscribe if you think you’d like that. http://orbitaloperations.com/

Wolverine. One of the most powerful, engaging, and controversial characters in the Marvel Universe. Or in any comics universe, really. He’s got some amazing characteristics, powers and abilities. Chief among those are Wolverine’s amazing adamantium claws. They are unbreakable and sharp as a Samurai’s katana. They were grafted to Wolverine’s skeleton, we are told. But how do they stay in there?

See, I started reading about Wolverine in the mid 1970s, shortly after his debut in The Incredible Hulk. It was around the same time that I became captivated by another technical marvel – The Six Million Dollar Man. Steve Austin didn’t have swords grafted to his arms, but he did have some fancy technology implanted and imbedded inside his body. Again, how did that bionic arm stay on and the bionic stuff in the arm (and elsewhere) stay connected to his skeleton?

Of course all these implants did all kinds of cool stuff. Stuff like cutting and blocking and lifting. And I was (and am) impressed by that for sure. But the nascent scientist in me was amazed at what held it all in. Why didn’t Wolverine’s claws come right off the bones in his forearms when he tried to cut through something? And, for those anatomy aficionados in the crowd, why don’t the claws flip over when his radius move as he turns his wrist? While I can’t provide an answer to the last question, science continues to provide some clues to the former.

Once again it’s tissue engineering and materials science to the rescue. I’m fascinated by these related branches of biomedical engineering. Seriously. If I wasn’t already committed to this whole neuroscience brain-and-behaviour gig I’d be all over biomedical engineering. And some recent discoveries in this field related to bone implants have significant implications for how we might really attach adamantium to bone. After we discover adamantium, of course. (This is your cue, metallurgical engineers. In the words of Stan Lee–Excelsior!)

It gets even better, though. That’s because they were trying to improve the strength of bone connection to implanted devices especially those made from titanium. The coolest element this side of adamantium and vibranium. Titanium is commonly used in the manufacture of joint replacements, most notably the hip. Titanium also gets extra cool kudos by virtue of being a real element.

What this team discovered was that they could stimulate better growth between bone and titanium by using a special superglue adhesive in rats. This adhesive consisted of multilayers of ceramics and nanolayers of polymers mixed up with protein. This super-slurry mix included signaling molecules that bone would normally detect as bone. Since bone likes to grow back to itself, the basic concept was to trick the body into thinking the titanium implant was bone (or at least bone-like).

This was accomplished by making many, many, ultra-thin layers that then worked like superglue to help get bone cells to grow together. This worked much better than conventional bone cement that has a more brittle and less stable outcome. It’s kind of like really good double-sided tape. Except it’s biological tape that grows both ways and has bone growth proteins (for those keeping score it’s osteoinductive bone morphogenetic protein–2, or BMP-2 for short) that help stimulate this growth.

I love this study. Like much of the best science it’s simple and elegant. Lead author Nisarg Shah and colleagues made all kinds of advanced measures (like regulatory hormone release and stem cell differentiation) on how well implants adhered to bone using this new procedure. But some of the measures were also very simple and included how much force was required to pull the implants out when different adhesives were used. The bottom line is that this new approach seems to be a great improvement on the old bone cement model. This is a very real world concern for joint replacements such as hip and knee in humans.

This study using a rodent model is a fantastic proof of principle that dramatic improvements in the fidelity and stability of implanted devices in humans is on the horizon. Human trials are planned next and will the next test of this approach. We really are on the road that will take us to more stable implants of many devices.

We’re currently shooting from the hip, but can claws really be that far away?

I also have presences on Tumblr, Facebook (a Page) and G+, but those are just coverage and for occasional play. The Snapchat account is also just me farting around: I’ve been writing about apps and code in that general space lately, which is why I have it. Also also, I have WhatsApp, for friends only.

And that’s that. After Friday, there won’t be daily posts here for some time, so I thought I’d get this in now, just for old time’s sake.

(And to forestall the usual questions: the photo was glitched with the Decim8 app, and the text was added with the Over app, both iOS in this instance.)